The modern itch after knowledge of foreign places is so prevalent that the generality of mankind bestow little thought or time upon the place of their nativity.
Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland
Eliminating distance kills. Rene Char
Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland
Eliminating distance kills. Rene Char
Distance (and duration) is a matter of perspective. In the same time it might take me to cycle from Glasgow to Stirling, another (by a different means of transport) could have travelled to the northern rim of Africa. There is something sinister about air travel however, something not quite right about circumnavigating the globe in the time it would take the average person to walk from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Though it may proceed in bursts, nature does not receive such ‘jumps’ so readily. Eliminating distance kills. The soul, the Arabs believe, can only travel as fast as the pace of a trotting camel.
When we close ourselves off from the landscape and glassily pass through it (as with a plane or a car), sometimes not even seeing it (nevermind feeling it), something is lost in the process. Distance is killed. It’s not just a case of outsourcing our trajective energy to a polluting and profligate machine, but of crossing the world without the essential in-betweenness.
The loss of the interstitial soon leads to a 'neitherwhere' (neither here nor there), and an existential void (the A to B reduced to the simply AB) in which the mechanical process of relocation denies us our own locomotive force. Since the body-mind-world are inseparable, this mechanical denial radically affects our perspective not just of the world but of our own place within it. The ramifications of this depleted worldview, as we are beginning to see, can be horrendous for the body and the mind, and the larger world which embodies them.
In being seduced by speed and the promise of an easy life, [not knowing the kernel paradox that lies at the core of this promise - that the easy life is a vacuous life: that the less we put into it and the more we outsource this life to technology (that is neither techne nor logos) the less we get out of it], we have effectively allowed our selves to have been stripped of their dignity as hyper-organic entities. Obesity (whether of spirit or of body) is the great symptom (or the 'silent epidemic' as the UK government have labelled it) of this easy age.
The (short) answer? Start walking, start cycling (the real flying!), start slowing down… and reconnect to the body, to the soul… to the trotting camel. Start moving across the land under your own steam, and leave the car and the plane behind.
When we close ourselves off from the landscape and glassily pass through it (as with a plane or a car), sometimes not even seeing it (nevermind feeling it), something is lost in the process. Distance is killed. It’s not just a case of outsourcing our trajective energy to a polluting and profligate machine, but of crossing the world without the essential in-betweenness.
The loss of the interstitial soon leads to a 'neitherwhere' (neither here nor there), and an existential void (the A to B reduced to the simply AB) in which the mechanical process of relocation denies us our own locomotive force. Since the body-mind-world are inseparable, this mechanical denial radically affects our perspective not just of the world but of our own place within it. The ramifications of this depleted worldview, as we are beginning to see, can be horrendous for the body and the mind, and the larger world which embodies them.
In being seduced by speed and the promise of an easy life, [not knowing the kernel paradox that lies at the core of this promise - that the easy life is a vacuous life: that the less we put into it and the more we outsource this life to technology (that is neither techne nor logos) the less we get out of it], we have effectively allowed our selves to have been stripped of their dignity as hyper-organic entities. Obesity (whether of spirit or of body) is the great symptom (or the 'silent epidemic' as the UK government have labelled it) of this easy age.
The (short) answer? Start walking, start cycling (the real flying!), start slowing down… and reconnect to the body, to the soul… to the trotting camel. Start moving across the land under your own steam, and leave the car and the plane behind.
'Beautiful' [Pacific Quay, January 2010]
The beauty of 'world' reveals itself to those who travel under their own steam....
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